Like Leprosy (Fault and Beauty Blended Together)
by Culumacilinte
Summary: Withnail finally lands a job. He's not ready for it. Marwood (nominally) picks up (some of the) pieces.


**Warnings**: Dubious consent on various levels, really bad sex

Withnail has been calling it his Big Break since he landed the role a month ago. And all right, Webster isn't Shakespeare, and all right, he's only playing Ferdinand when any casting director with _sense_ would see that he clearly should have been Daniel, and all right, it's playing above the Three-Legged Mare and not at a proper theatre, but, _but_\- and Marwood could deliver the monologue himself now, he's heard it so many times- just let those _wankers_ who refused him piddling adverts see him now. _Now_ they'll see what he's worth, _now_ they'll see what an _actor_ is!

It should come as no surprise that now that it's come to it, he's bollocksed it up horribly.

Withnail's drunk. But then, Withnail's always drunk, more or less, so it's not as if that's a surprise. There's a level of drunk, though, at which Withnail is perfectly capable of performing his duties as a human being with a minimum of fuss; he is well and truly past that level. He's late for his first entrance, stumbling onto the little stage in a way which makes it obvious, and he slouches and sniggers throughout the scene like a teenager studying Webster for the first time at school: 'Hah! Sir, he said _touch-wood_ sir! Is that dirty, sir?'

It only gets worse. Before even the intermission, he ceases to be able to remember his lines, and when the poor fucker playing Pescara, who's clearly worth a larger role than he's got, hisses a prompting 'Methinks her fault-?' out of the corner of his mouth, Withnail rounds on him.

He's reeling, face blotchy under the stage makeup which had made him look nearly human for once and not like a drowned corpse, and he draws himself up, all his long limbs in a kind of desperate bid for gravitas. 'Tell me my lines, would you? I _do_ beg your pardon, do you think this is _school_? This is serious theatre.' He waves a wild hand at the audience, and Marwood winces. 'Look at them! The ladies and gentlemen out there didn't spend hard cash to hear some, some... art-college homosexual tart who's no better than the bit part he's managed feed lines to _me_!'

Withnail starts laughing, an awful wet hacking sound like a consumptive donkey, like someone's scraped out the inside of his lungs and left the remains to sit there and rattle gloopily around. Which is when the fear hits.

He can tell it's happening because time is slowing down, his eyes telescoping wildly in on Withnail, close enough that he imagines he can see every one of his pores, clogged up under the pancake of foundation and fighting for air. The too-familiar sense of impending doom, like this is _it_, like the fucking end of days is coming and all of Marwood's muscles have seized up, petrified in place. His heart's up in his throat, a wild, uneven tattoo like it wants to jump out of his mouth and go save Withnail from his own idiocy.

He can't stand it, can't hear anything other than Withnail's barking, slurring laughter and his own heartbeat. The godless jitter of anxiety. He feels dizzy. He's not getting enough air, and everyone will be able to _tell_. Even though who would be looking at him when there's Withnail up on stage making such a perfect spectacle of himself, he still imagines the eyes on him, like the rest of the audience might know that he's here with Withnail, that he's somehow responsible for the mad bastard.

'I'm sorry!' he gasps, hauling himself up out of his chair. His tongue is swollen, he can't feel his feet; all his extremities have gone numb. He manages to mumble, 'I need the loo,' contorting himself in the two-dimensional walk of shame that people do in theatres, squeezing between strangers' knees and the seats in front of them and trying as hard as he can to make himself into a silhouette.

The journey to the end of the aisle is interminable, and he can't even spare the attention to tell whether he's being watched or not, but he manages eventually, stumbling through the swinging doors and blessedly out into the corridor. Wood panelling and nicotine-stained whitewash, industrial-issue carpets; dark green with a floral pattern, and Marwood feels his throat convulse. He feels unusual.

His vision is going fuzzy now, tunnelling in like a television losing reception, and he's desperately thankful for the cool of the lavatory when he bursts in, shutting himself into the nearest cubicle with fingers like sausages. The noise of the main room of the pub filters through the door, but the main noise is his own breathing, too loud and too fast, the fucking fear making echoes of it, compressing everything into a single endless, gutless instant haemorrhaging out his pores. The dented metal of the cubicle wall is gorgeously cool, and he squeezes his eyes shut as he lets himself slump, forehead pressing against it. It slips with sweat, and he's clouted with the image of his own pores, the sweat glands gaping wide; the wall's probably crawling with germs, he's going to catch some kind of terrible mutant strain of disease and die here in this arse-fucking little toilet and it will _all be down to Withnail_.

He tries to bend his concentration to counting breaths.

Withnail finds him outside the pub later, sucking on a fag with shaking fingers. Frankly Marwood thinks it's a wonder he's bothered to stay and wait for him. Withnail doesn't see it that way.

'Were you not even _there_? Little wonder I cocked it up, without even the support of my so-called _friend_-'

Withnail is emoting more in this moment than he'd managed once on that stage, a grand Shakespearian sketch of betrayal. Marwood can't take it; he rides over him.

'Of course I was there!' He stops, pulls aside to draw a gob of spit up from the very depths of his larynx and hack it onto the pavement. It tastes sour, of bile. He hasn't been sick, but he still feels like he wants to. 'Only I had to go and have a cunting panic attack in the loos, didn't I? Couldn't have just forgotten your lines like any ordinary drunk luvvie, could you; no, you had to go off on Pescala-'

'Oh, how _very_ like you,' Withnail sneers. 'Making it all about you, as usual. It's _my_ career that's just been, been _viciously_ shot down, a flaming hulk of-' he's visibly grappling for metaphor, something sufficiently poetic that will impart to Marwood the enormity of the situation. 'Like a Panzer!' he settles on. '_My_ career the pathetic wreck of a once great- career.'

It is not the ending he wanted for that sentence, and he is visibly disappointed by it, swaying on the spot and sneering with goggle-eyed vitriol. His eyes, Marwood thinks, look like an angry fish's if you squeezed it too hard, bulging under mauve lids. And people are watching. The small and spottily interested crowd seems to be a mixture of pub patrons clutching half-full pints and people who'd come to see the play trailing out now that it's had to be cancelled; Withnail is, if nothing else, quality entertainment. Withnail doesn't care, but Marwood does; they're making him itch.

His fingers twitch. He yelps as he manages to ash on his own hand. 'Fucker!' he yowls, aggrieved, and hurls the fag to the pavement. 'Bollocks to your career,' he informs Withnail bluntly. There's a petty satisfaction in cruelty. Withnail wields that particular rapier often enough; Marwood deserves a chance now and again. 'There wasn't much there to ruin to begin with. I know _you_ need an audience for every bloody thing; I'm not staying here to be gawped at.'

'Fine!' Withnail declaims. 'I don't need _you_ to appreciate my art. I'm off for a drink; are you joining me or not?'

Marwood stares at him. 'No I'm not fucking joining you.' Withnail's huge, pale eyes seem horribly open for a moment, like he can't comprehend the refusal. Marwood can't bring himself to care. 'I'll see you at home.'

He keeps his hands in his pockets and his eyes down the whole way home. When he gets there, he toes off his shoes but doesn't bother with any of the rest of his clothes before taking a couple of blues and burrowing into his bed to crash the fuck out. Bugger consciousness.

He's still buzzed when he wakes up, he can tell from the treacly fuzz that's holding him pinned to the mattress, making it feel liquid and lovely when in truth it's pokey and lumpen. But something's woken him up. It takes him a baffled moment to identify that something as a mouth on his dick.

No, that can't be right, can it?

But it is _definitely_ a mouth on his dick. Had he passed out at a party? He can barely imagine the circumstances that would conspire to put a mouth on his dick whilst conscious and awake, much less passed out in his bed on a- what is this?- Thursday night. It's so unexpected that it takes several more stuttering, blank-brained moments for the synapses to come together in the right configuration to allow him to actually take in what's happening.

It's Withnail. He blinks slowly, gummy eyelashes sticking to each other. Withnail, crouched on the bed like an insect or a marionette with strings cut and left to fall in some anatomically improbable position, strings of greasy hair falling over his forehead as he regards Marwood's half-hard cock with the intense concentration of someone so drunk he is literally incapable of focussing on more than one thing at a time.

It is at this point that Marwood's body catches up with his brain, and he executes a sort of flailing twist that only succeeds in catching Withnail under the chin and knocking his teeth together with a hollow _clok_. That sound in such close proximity to his genitals is enough to make him freeze up again, and Withnail peers up at him with bleary affront.

'The fuck are you doing?' he manages. His voice sounds like his larynx tied itself into a knot around it and strangled it there in his throat, only to let it out once it had died.

'Don't,' Withnail waves a hand at him, like a skeleton with a smoking habit. 'Don't talk.'

His voice is clogged with drink, but he sounds nearly on the verge of tears. It is deeply disturbing. Marwood wishes he'd get off his leg. But he doesn't; instead he puts his face into Marwood's hip, flesh digging into the corduroy of his opened trousers, and makes a horrible hiccoughing noise. Marwood recoils.

'Oh god, are you going to cry? Don't- please don't do that.'

He doesn't know what he wants; maybe for Withnail to draw himself up, all derision that Marwood would dare accuse him of such a thing, but he doesn't. He stays where he is, curled around Marwood's leg, face pressed next to his wilted cock, which is slimy with spit and going cold in the open air. He's reminded of a dead squirrel which had fascinated them both last winter, stuck frozen to the branch of a tree in the park until it had dried out, nothing left but a desiccated, mummified husk, sad and tiny. Marwood awkwardly lifts his hands, not sure if he's allowed to touch, or even if he wants to.

Withnail's voice, when he speaks, buzzing against Marwood's hip, is unnervingly small, his usual blue-blooded baritone crept up the register into something nearly childish. 'Just lemme- please. I c'n do this, I can. I wanna.'

His cheek muscles convulse, pulling his mouth awkwardly off to the side in something like revulsion or pity. All of Withnail's pomp and disdain has been leached out of him by booze and humiliation; he's barely even human at this point, just a puddle of chemicals and indignity held together by hair oil and suiting.

'Withnail-' he starts, with no idea of how he's going to finish, and apparently that's the thing that was needed to jolt Withnail's attention away from his hip and up to Marwood's face. He makes a noble attempt at a sneer, but his eyes are far too bright.

'Do you want me to fucking blow you or not?'

It's the sort of question that assumes an answer in the affirmative, but Marwood isn't sure he _does_ want Withnail to blow him. This- and this situation has occurred to him, or something like it, in his more fevered imaginings- is not how he'd pictured this. Not that he can, in fact, picture any circumstance in which getting off with Withnail would not somehow be sordid and awful, but he'd never pictured Withnail _begging_.

But Withnail, the fucker, seems to be waiting for an answer. Hadn't stopped him from ploughing ahead when Marwood had been out cold, but now he's conscious, apparently Withnail's developed some notion about consent. The coward couldn't even just go ahead with it; Marwood can't make decisions right now; his brain isn't equipped for it.

'Fine,' he says eventually. 'Might as well since you've started.'

And Withnail gives him a horrible grin, all spittle down his chin and wet gums, assures him, 'M good at this,' and sets to.

Withnail is not, as it turns out, good at this. Or at least, he's not bad, because it's hard to be _bad_ at a blowjob unless there are teeth involved, but he's sloppy, his spit tacky with dehydration, and Marwood's dick is halfhearted at best about the attention. He keeps getting images of a jaundiced ring of nicotine yellow around the base of his cock like an ill version of what he's heard blokes chortling and laughing to each other about blowies from chicks wearing lipstick. Even when he does manage to get hard, he suffers a horrible paranoid jolt every time the head of his cock bumps against Withnail's palate or the back of his throat, afraid that Withnail's going to vomit on him.

It's like wanking when you've got flu, just to get yourself to sleep, or because you're bored, or drunk, or whatever. The process ceases to be really enjoyable, all the sensation slightly on the edge of pain, too sluggish and weighed down to invest any real energy into proceedings, but knowing that now you've started you might as well get an orgasm out of it. And when, eventually, Marwood can feel himself nearly there, he lets out a breath of relief. Thank fuck.

'I'm gonna- Withnail, I'm gonna come. Get off me, y'bastard.'

For the first time since this ridiculous charade began, he touches him, reaches a hand down into his hair (greasy with pomade and not washing, it slicks his fingers and palm) and gives a little tug. It's a warning, or an attempt to get him to pull back, but all it does is make Withnail moan, wrenched and desperate, and practically swallow his cock.

He's entirely unprepared for the wash of genuine arousal that sweeps through him, and his fingers clench in Withnail's hair. Suddenly there isn't enough oxygen in the room. The thought occurs to him, ridiculously, that swallowing would probably be good for him. There's got to be protein in semen, yeah? He could save the bastard from scurvy with the healing power of blowjobs. He comes, surprised, in the middle of a slightly hysterical laugh. Withnail does swallow; Marwood feels it in a convulsive heave of muscles around his cock. It should feel good; instead it makes him feel faintly queasy.

The haze of barbs and endorphins takes him for some moments in the silence that follows. Or not silence, really; the sound of two pairs of lungs and a heart doing more work than usual. When he looks up, Withnail is sat there on his knees limply like someone had dropped him there, eyes glassy and unfocussed, a dribble of jizz down his chin, gone the colour of wet cement

'Oh- oh no you _bloody_ don't.'

All mental fuzz gone, he struggles up and shoves Withnail off the bed.

A second later comes the sound of Withnail sicking up, expansively, onto his bedroom floor. Marwood closes his eyes and groans.

'M sorry,' Withnail's muttering into his shoulder as Marwood wrestles him into the bathroom, repeating it with slurry insistence. He never apologises when he's sober; hell, he hardly even apologises when he's drunk, but now he's barely even conscious, a sack of limp bones and pallid flesh, and all he can apparently bring himself to say is that he's sorry, he's sorry, he's sorry.

Marwood's pleasant low is now entirely gone, and he perfunctorily strips Withnail of his jacket and dunks his head into the bath. Withnail coughs and struggles and retches again, but he hasn't got much energy left in him, and allows it when Marwood drags him back into the sitting room and dumps him on the couch. Within seconds, he's unconscious.

Withnail doesn't deserve it; if the bastard wants to drink himself comatose, he deserves every chance of choking on his own vomit and dying in the night; he _certainly_ doesn't deserve someone to sit by his snoring carcass and make sure he doesn't die. But the smell would be unbearable. So Marwood sits in the chair next to the couch, puts on a record, and grabs a book. He's not really tired anymore anyway.


End file.
